New Android Wear features finally come to the Motorola smartwatch
We’ve been living with the refreshed and refined Android Wear on the LG Watch Urbane for a while now. So it’s good news for Moto 360 owners that you can finally get in on the action – the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update is currently rolling out to all Motorola smartwatches.
What does that mean? Well, with no Moto 360 2 in sight, owners of the original round-faced smartwatch are getting some pretty exciting features in the form of Wi-Fi support for when your phone isn’t around, as well as always-on apps, a new launcher, emojis and gesture controls for scrolling through Google Now cards.
Essential reading: Moto 360 Sport guide
The Moto 360 update was confirmed at the end of last week by Wayne Piekarski, a senior development advocate at Google, on Google Plus. Why the wait? The reason given by Motorola for not pushing it out earlier was performance and battery issues. If yours hasn’t come through yet, just remember these things can take a few days to catch everyone.
All in all, it’s a huge update to Android Wear but there’s still work to do. In our updated review of the OS we said: “In our testing we’ve found the updates coming over Wi-Fi, when not tethered to a phone, hit and miss at best.”
Hands-on: Moto 360 2015 edition review
Still, there’s lots more to come, Google Now is improving all the time and though the Apple Watch already boasts more apps, Google is clearly very committed to making Android Wear a solid, useful platform.
